Orioles Have New York Connection: In Dugout and Broadcast Booth

BALTIMORE — Mark Reynolds’s second home run in three innings and eighth in seven games had begun its high arc toward the lower left-field seats last Thursday night when the voice of Gary Thorne, an Orioles television broadcaster, took flight with it.

“In the air to left field. It is deep. Are you kidding me? Goodbye! Home run! Unbelievable!” was Thorne’s call of the eighth-inning homer, sealing Baltimore’s 10-6 win over the Yankees and locking the teams into a first-place tie as this weekend’s four-game showdown opened at a suddenly boisterous Camden Yards.

The home run landed a few sections from the picnic pavilion where, several hours before, Thorne had officiated at the unveiling of a statue honoring the Orioles great Cal Ripken, who broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak precisely 17 years earlier. Several current Orioles attended the ceremony in uniform, including Manager Buck Showalter.

In a season when the Orioles are surprising everyone by making a run at the Yankees, Thorne and Showalter have notable New York links. They made their major league debuts in New York: Showalter as the Yankees’ manager in the mid-1990s and Thorne during two terms as a Mets broadcaster from 1985 to 2002.

Between them, they own one World Series ring — Thorne’s, from the Mets’ 1986 championship, a team primed to win and, therefore, as he put it last Thursday, “180 degrees different” from the current Orioles club.

Only two current Baltimore players — Tommy Hunter and Jim Thome (on the disabled list) — have played in a World Series. When center fielder Adam Jones joined the Orioles four years ago, he noticed Thorne’s 1986 Series ring and told him he wanted one, too, Thorne said.

Now that does not seem so far-fetched a notion, although Thorne laughed off the idea that he had imported some good luck from his time with the Mets, who hardly seem that fortunate these days.

At 63, Thorne has been there and done that, and done all of it well. Major league baseball, minor league baseball, ESPN, hockey, postseason games for Major League Baseball’s international telecasts.

He joined the Orioles in 2008, when they were still in the midst of a miserable 15-year run, a stretch marked by only one finish as high as third place in the American League East and an average 28-game abyss between them and first place at season’s end.

But now? Suddenly, out of nowhere, Baltimore is back.

“It’s my luck: right place, right time,” Thorne said in the booth before Thursday’s game. “I’ve always said, I’ve never hit a home run, never had an R.B.I., never threw a strike. To be here to see this club have this kind of phenomenal, unexpected year is just great fun.”

Making baseball pleasurable for fans is a lesson Thorne said he gleaned from listening to Curt Gowdy and Ned Martin broadcast Red Sox games on “the transistor radio under my pillow” growing up in Old Town, Me.

Photo

Gary Thorne, an Orioles television broadcaster since 2008, was the M.C. at the Hall of Fame induction ceremony last year.Credit
Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

Thorne began his major league career as a broadcaster with the Mets in 1985 and remembers Davey Johnson, who was then managing the club and is now steering the Washington Nationals to the postseason, allowing him to shag fly balls during that initial spring training. Working alongside Bob Murphy with the Mets helped his career greatly, Thorne said.

“Bob taught me a lot, but he taught me most about focus,” Thorne said before departing for the first of two Ripken ceremonies. “He was amazing. He just never wandered.”

To know what he is talking about, Thorne reads extensively before every game, then interviews each teams’ players and chats with other broadcasters. That routine, he said, derives from his previous career as a lawyer, including four years in Washington with the Army Judge Advocate General Corps.

One of the things that Thorne does best is to seize the moment, whether it is dramatic or mildly absurd. When the Rogers Centre roof in Toronto became stuck last week while the Blue Jays were trying to close it during a fifth-inning storm, Thorne went to work.

With Jones batting against Carlos Villanueva, Thorne deadpanned: “We’ve heard of pitchers throwing from sunshine into shadows. I’m not sure we’ve had one throw from dryness into rain.”

With each camera shot of fans grasping open umbrellas, coaches looking toward the ceiling and the grounds crew raking dry dirt into the infield, Thorne poked fun at the scene’s absurdity. He invoked the singer B. J. Thomas, urged viewers to record the game for posterity and summoned statistics on the stadium’s four previous game delays (three: rain, one: bugs).

So it goes for Thorne, who combines knowledge and enthusiasm, brightly colored shirts — purple in Toronto, blue in Baltimore — and assorted lapel pins for every game, including the Gary Thorne bobblehead lapel pin that ESPN’s Little League World Series crew presented to him last month.

Once a month, Thorne wears a Hall of Fame pin. Each week, he puts on a souvenir of his Mets years: the pin issued the night in 1997 that Major League Baseball retired Jackie Robinson’s No. 42.

Thorne said he wears it in appreciation of all that Robinson “went through to make possible what so many benefited from.”

“No one will ever understand,” he said of Robinson.

There is an unexpected division race to attend to, a bonus for 2012 that Thorne probably never saw coming. But he has earned it.

A version of this article appears in print on September 9, 2012, on page SP2 of the New York edition with the headline: Orioles Have New York Connection: In Dugout and Broadcast Booth. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe